Hugo Münsterberg

“ We can look at the opera, can see every singer and every singer's gown, can listen to every word, can have the whole plot in mind, can hear the thousands of tones which come from the orchestra; and yet combine all that in one act of attention, because it all belongs to the same setting of our reactive apparatus. Whatever the one wants is wanted by the others. But if at the same time our neighbor speaks to us, we do not notice it; his words work as a stimulus which demands an entirely different motor setting as answer. ”

“ We have confined ourselves to the question of how far such a movement is sound for the interests of the patient; but can we be blind to the other side and overlook the not less important problem of whether it lies in the interests of religion and of the church to amalgamate its spiritual work with a medical one? We are not thinking of those widespread, unfair arguments to the effect that this whole movement is undignified because it is instituted by the desire to fill the empty pews or to make competition with the success of Christian Science. ”

“ No argument will overwhelm the suggestion which religion has settled in our inner life, and from this strongest suggestion which can stand against any temptation of life small psychological steps lead down to the little bits of suggestion with which our daily chance life is over-flooded. Every advertisement in the newspaper, every display in the shop-window, every warm intonation in the voice of our neighbor has its suggestive power, that is, it brings its content in such a way to our minds that the desire to do the opposite is weakened. ”

“ The psychologist, on the other hand, finds an endless manifoldness of elements which are not in space, and which have no space form whatever. My will is neither triangular nor oval; my emotion is neither shorter than five feet nor longer; my memory image of a melody has no thickness and no tallness; my contents of consciousness are as such not in space; their elements cannot pass through any space movements like the atoms of the physicist. ”

“ What is gained if some nervous disorders are helped by belief, if the belief itself devastates our intellectual culture and brings the masses down again to a view of the world which has all the earmarks of barbarism? That is indeed one of the central dangers of all non-medical suggestive cures, that while any belief may cure through the mere emotional power of the act of believing, the content of the belief gains an undeserved appearance of truth. Any absurd superstition can become accredited because its curative value may be equal to a truly valuable suggestion. ”

“ Those who narrowly seek every truth only in the scientific understanding, ought to be reminded that this seeking for causal connections is itself, after all, only a life experience which as such is not of causal but of purposive character. "Life is bigger than thought." In the immediate reality of our purposive life we aim towards mastering the world by a causal understanding, and for this end we create science; but this aim itself is then a purpose and not an object. The first act is thus for us, the thinkers, not a part of the causal events, but a purposive intention towards an ideal. ”

“ As mere bits of psychological experience, I may have any ideas together in my consciousness. I can think summer and winter or day and night or right and left or black and white or love and hate in one embracing thought. ”

“ There is no doubt that the routine physician is doing by far too little in these respects. His instinctive feeling that disease is a causal process, and that he should therefore keep away from the purposive attitude, leads him too easily to a dangerous narrowness. He treats disease as if it were an isolated process and overlooks the thousandfold connections in which the nervous system stands with the patient's whole life experience in past and future. ”

“ Consciousness has in itself no limit; all organization belongs to the content. Whatever psychical states are attributed to one organism belong thus to its consciousness but all the connections are entirely connections of the content. We, therefore, have not even the right to say that consciousness, as such, has unity. Unity too belongs to the organization of the content. One part of the content hangs together with the other parts but consciousness is only the constant condition for their existence. ”

“ We remain identical with ourselves because every purpose is posited in the midst of, and bound up with, the general purpose of ourselves. And in this internal unity of meaning, nothing breaks ourselves into pieces, and the whole manifold of experience is thus expressed by a personality which knows itself in its purposive unity. But this unity again is denied by our own intention as soon as we decide to take the causal view of inner life. The purposive unity must now transform itself into an endless complexity, and our own self becomes a composite of hundreds of thousands of elements. ”

“ The one idea may bring to me another idea by association, but as long as I consider both strictly as mental facts, I can never understand why this association happens, I can never grasp the real mechanism of the connection, I can never see necessity between the disappearance of the one and the appearance of the other. It remains a mystery which does not justify any expectation that the same sequence will result again. Whatever belongs to the psychical world can never be linked by a real insight into necessity. ”

“ The norm never means merely a majority. Even if the overwhelmingly larger part of mankind suffered from phthisis, the few who were free from it would be recognized as well and all the others would be considered ill. In mental life still more, no one ought to propose that the exceptional function is the symptom of disease. The few persons who never had a dream in their lives differ much in their mental experience from the large majority and yet their peculiarity is certainly not a symptom which needs curative treatment. The only real test of health is the serviceableness to the needs of life. ”

“ Moreover it would condemn itself if it were to deny that which gives meaning to the endeavors of our life and thus also to every search for truth. Psychology claims only that we must abstract from it, when we take the psychological standpoint towards life. Freedom of our real life means that we must know ourselves in the midst of our life work as guided by aims and obligations, and that in this purposive existence of ourselves we do not feel ourselves as determined by causes. I will the fulfillment of my ideals only because I will them. ”

“ We look with a condescending smile at the old-fashioned periods in which the demands of authority and discipline controlled the education of the child and after all the education of the adult to his last days. We have substituted for it the demand of freedom with all its blessings, but instead of the blessings we too often get all its vices. A go-as-you-please method characterizes our whole society from the kindergarten to the height of life. ”

“ From a psychological standpoint our own mental life and that of our neighbor, that of the man and that of the child, that of the normal and that of the insane, that of the human being and that of the animal, are to be considered as a series of mental objects. They are to be analyzed, and to be described, and to be classified and to be explained, just as we deal with the physical objects in the outer world. How are these objects of the psychologist different from the objects of the physicist, from the pebbles on the way and the stars in the sky? ”

“ Surely if we think how this, our subconscious mind, is able to hold all our memories and all our learning, and how it transacts all the work of controlling our useful actions and of bringing up the right ideas, we may well acknowledge that compared with it our conscious life is rather a small part. It is as with the iceberg in the ocean; we know that only a small part is visible above the surface of the water and a ten times larger mountain swims below the sea. ”

“ As long as we are under the suggestion of the novelist, we really believe in the existence of the heroine; we really believe in the validity of the political party principle; it is not an argument to which we simply give our attention, it becomes a suggestion only when the belief in its objective existence controls our minds. We may say in general that suggestions which are not suggestions of actions are without exception suggestions of belief. Actions and beliefs are the only possible material of any suggestion.
Yet what else is a belief than a preparation for action? ”

“ In psychology, it can never mean that the consciousness which is a subject of all experience is at the same time object of any experience. Its whole meaning lies in its being the passive spectator. That of which consciousness becomes aware in self-consciousness is the idea of the personality, which is certainly a content. The personality, the actor of our actions, is thus never anything but an object in psychology, and consciousness never anything but a subject. Consciousness itself is thus in no way altered when the idea of the personality is changing. ”

“ Every element of a man's life history, impressions of early childhood, his love and his successes, his diseases and his distresses, his acquaintances and his reading, his talent, his character, his sincerity, his energy, his intelligence—everything—ought to determine the choice of the psychotherapeutic steps. As it is entirely impossible to determine all those factors by any sufficient inquiry, most of the adjustment of method must be left to the instinct of the physician, in which wide experience, solid knowledge, tact, and sympathy ought to be blended. ”

“ The whole causal view of man is thus a tool in the service of the purposive man. This is the reason why it is indeed utterly absurd to think that psychology can ever help us to determine which end we ought to reach.
In education, for instance, very many different ends might be reached; psychology cannot decide anything. The decision as to the aims of education must be made by ethics, which indeed takes not a causal but a purposive attitude. Only after ethics has selected the aim, psychology can teach us how to reach it. Of course this principle must hold for the physician too. ”

“ Psychology is endlessly far from this ideal to-day. It has been claimed, not without justice, that psychology has reached to-day only the level which physics attained in the seventeenth century; but psychology must insist that its ideal lies in this direction. No one takes a real psychological view of the human mind who does not understand this endless complexity of the material, and who does not see that even the simplest mental state practically presents a most complex problem to scientific analysis. ”

“ Daily life teaches us, for instance, how our mental states are dependent upon most various bodily influences. If the temperature of the blood is raised in fever, the mental processes may go over into far-reaching confusion; if hashish is smoked, the mind wanders to paradise, and a few glasses of wine may give a new mental optimism and exuberance; a cup of tea may make us sociable, a dose of bromide may annihilate the irritation of our mind, and when we inhale ether, the whole content of consciousness fades away. ”

“ We are now ready to take the first step towards an examination of the problem of curing suffering mankind. So far we have spoken only of the meaning of psychology, of its principles and of its fundamental theories as to mind and brain. We have moved in an entirely theoretical sphere. Now we approach a field in which everything is controlled by a practical aim, the treatment of the sick. Yet our discussion of psychology should have brought us much nearer to the point where we can enter this realm of medicine. Everything depends on the right point of entrance. ”

“ To those who are inclined to give all value and all credit only to the strictly psychological view, it may be replied at once that surely our most immediate life experience is carried on by the non-psychological attitude. If we love our family and like our friends, and deal with the man of the street, we are certainly moving in a world of purposive reality. We try to understand each other, to agree and to disagree, to be in sympathy and antipathy, without asking how those volitions and feelings and ideas of other people are built as mental structures, and from what causes they arose ”

“ In other words I have always felt behind me a great force pressing me out into public work. When I was a child, it was so strong that I was sat down upon brutally, to so great an extent that I feared to voice my convictions and that fear still clings to me like a nemesis. ”

“ If I want to understand the meaning of this scene every [Pg 11] reminiscence of physics will lead me astray; if I want to calculate the movement of my boat, physics alone can help me.
As long as we deal with outer nature, there is hardly a fear of confusing the various attitudes; but it becomes by far more complex when we deal with man and his inner life. We might abstract entirely from æsthetic appreciation or from moral valuation, we might take man just as an object of knowledge; and yet what we know about him may be entirely different in accordance with our special attitude. ”

“ There is no human life into which suggestion does not enter in a hundred forms. Family life and education, law and business, public life and politics, art and religion are carried by suggestion. A suggestion is, we might say at first, an idea which has a power in our mind to suppress the opposite idea. A suggestion is an idea which in itself is not different from other ideas, but the way in which it takes possession of the mind reduces the chances of any opposite ideas ”

“ When science has thus mastered the whole physical universe, it finally brings even the mental life of man under the naturalistic point of view, treats his inner experiences like any outer objects, tears them in pieces, analyzes them, and studies them as functions of the nervous system. A scientific psychology is thus reached which is the climax of realism, because it means that even the ideas and emotions and volitions of man are treated as natural phenomena, that their causes are sought and that their effects are determined, that their laws are found out. ”